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Today I spent about 3.5 – 4 hours in one game, so this post is coming a little on the late side. I promise this was worth it. Sean Oxspring sent me a copy of this game to preview some time ago and I left it in my downloads. I can honestly say I will never uninstall this game for the shallow hope I will be able to bring my murderous dungeon of death to others. This game is a ton of fun and, although it is simple, the open and social nature of this game is what makes it so much more intriguing. It is the first game that I’ve seen that uses social media as a preexisting user workshop where dungeons can be made and propagated on twitter.

Starting from the basics, this game has two characters: blue and green… but for the sake of them sounding cooler than just a pair of primary colors, we’ll call them Verdi and Azure. Through rampant speculation, it looks like Verdi is female and Azure is male as Verdi is slimmer/smaller, but it could just be a wiry little guy. Either way, to me Verdi is female, Azure is male. Both characters have the same magic-missile attack, so if they are both guys, the only style differentiation comes from the colors. After speaking with the game’s creators, I am told that this game will later features varied classes such as knights and rangers!

At the very least I assume Verdi is female cause it looks like her hair is longer

Of course, you don’t select a character until you’ve chosen a dungeon to run. What it seems is that you will take a minute compiling various tweets under the #hashtagdungeon with a specified dungeon hashtag. Mine was #deathtothesheeple and you can run it if you dare, though I haven’t gotten all the way through it myself. It is pretty tough, sure, but I also get this message as the game crashes. It is an early game, so it has a few bugs. This happens to me almost every time I encountered numerous zombies in one room.

This is horrifying on its own, considering you don’t have any saves. Granted, a standard dungeon only takes about twenty minutes to run. But then again, this is what my dungeon’s floorplan looks like:

So it is a little bit taxing on a computer, I guess…

Each darkened square is a room, by the way. If you don’t have the gams to run one of these dungeons without the promise of a saved game, you might want to consider something easier. This pixelated, retro runner is like Contra and the difficulty is up to the lunacy of those crating the dungeon. I can tell you right now that there are a decent number of loot and treasure rooms, but getting to them can be a challenge. Keep in mind, though, this is a good 3 (ish) hours of on-off work. @hashtagdungeon can attest to that. They recieved a good 90% of the tweets!

In each room you will find an assorted collection of monsters and enemies, traps and sometimes (if the dungeon creator cares enough) some loot and health! Once you are in a room, every entrance is blocked until you kill everything in the room. Keeps adventurers honest. Personally, I feel that creating dungeons is a big part of playing this game. After all, if no one makes dungeons, what will players run?

Shittiest library ever. 1/10 would scream at checkout.

The above is one of the rooms I created in my dungeon. I feel I started most times at the scenes, which are what the dungeon room looks like. This one is the library. I threw in an Oculus (the beholder in the center) and a couple demon dogs. This screen is where the most additions will be visible. Even if you don’t create dungeons regularly, you’ll end up coming here just to get a good hold on things that are in the game since last update. Once you have a scene set in place, you can pick from the traps or enemies. You can see that I set in four spike pits that will pop up and down as you avoid the enemies. The traps and enemies will fill that green bar. The further the room is from the center, the more enemies and traps you can fill the room with, you sadist.

Magic and objects in the special category will fill that bar as well. Magic contains various spells that will make enemies more powerful. They’ll shoot out little electric charges, run faster or take more damage. Those are actually the only spells right now, but the guys over at Hashtag Dungeon are working on a number of add-ins, including a halloween update! Special objects tend to consist of loot, monster generators and things that contain loot. This is good, since you’ll die without buffs, and pretty quickly.

The last element is the clutter. You can see four little pots in the room above. Those pots are destructible, and they can give you loot and power-ups alike. As you place them, the blue bar will fill up. It takes a good bit of clutter to fill up a room entirely, but this is likely to keep people from doing something really irritating and filling up an entire room and making the only way through open by stepping on exploding traps numerous times. That would be a real dick move… which I totally tried to do.

I ran for cover a LOT in my own dungeon.

The way this game spreads the dungeon rooms to players is pretty ingenious, though. As you make each room, you hit TWEET to save the room and simultaneously send out the data to recreate that room in other versions of the game. I am impressed since I have never heard of anyone else sending out data for mass consumption in 140 characters or less. These guys deserve applause.

Overall this is a great game and its devs are hard at work trying to make it a reality. It is a lot of fun creating a dungeon, but then playing it and having others play it? It is a lot of great fun. Of course, it won’t exist without your help. Go check out the game’s website for more info about the game and to sign up for the mailing list. Vote for the game on Steam Greenlight, please! This game implements amazing ingenuity and it shows what really lies at the hart of videogames as a whole: the desire to reach out and play with others. That sounded a little dirty. LoL! Either way, vote this game up! It’s a great example of the experiments of ingenuity that indie gaming allows. It is great fun now in its natal stages, despite a few bugs, and it will be a monumental achievement once it has gotten a little traction and is able to really take hold of an audience.

Punching its way out of Macedonia, Rhubberman is a game about beating things to death with fists of fury! It has a flair that feels like it should be in an arcade and from what I’ve seen in the promo video on alt ctrl jam, the native controls invented by the developers would make this an arcade game of demanding coordination. The best part is that the game in itself is not complex. Don’t let the enemy aliens stop you from sitting and ruminating on your favorite thinkin’ spot!

Shoopy Games was kind enough to let me demo the game in late August, before there was sound. A month has gone by and it shows in the game itself with sound effects, music and new enemies! The player takes the role of a ‘Rhubber,’ one of the denizens of the planet Rh’ubba. These guys look like mutated biker smurfs with four arms and an insatiable desire for fisticuffs. Their race is one that miners and they never really wanted to do much more than that. These fuckers make food out of the radioactive minerals of their world, which is how they ended up looking like Goro’s psychotic cousin. The developer’s put a lot of time into this game’s lore, too, and you can read more about it on their blog!

In their video, the devs show that they made a pretty awesome apparatus to control the game. Of course, not everyone is awesome enough to be on the early-adopter’s side of the Macedonian Quad-troller (as I am coining the dev’s hardware), so playing this on the PC is a little simpler. There are 5 buttons: ‘Q’ ‘Z’ ‘,’ ‘p’ and the spacebar. Hitting Q and P allows you to extend your upper arms while hitting Z and , allow you to extend your lower arms. Extending your arms is your only real defense against foes, and there are two types. Fuck you, I’ll tell you about the goddamn spacebar in a minute!

I love the purple beard!

As you stand atop your pillar of tobacco-chewing rumination, these big red and green fuckers fly out of the corners of the screen to munch on you. To defeat them, you have to time your barrage of blows and pay attention! The red guys don’t really do much, other than suck. They’ll fly at you, sometimes three at a time, and be assholes. The green guys are real bastards, though. These guys may slow things down a little, but they can deploy shields, getting them in closer for the kill. That’s ok, though. Just makes the fist that much more terrible.

Once you have hit enough enemies to fill the meter at the top of the screen, you can hit the spacebar. This causes your guy to make a crazy face and shoot all four arms out at the same time, getting more kills and taking out more enemies than you should be able to.

This game is one more about timing than speed, and trying to deploy punches too fast will keep you from hitting the next enemy in time until you eventually get eaten. It’s a good time and worth a few plays! My understanding is that the developers are working to get this little arcade game up on itch.io soon, but time will tell! For now, people can check it out on Alt Ctrl Jam! Vote it up and see if you can save Rh’ubba or just become the next purple meal on a stick!

I was looking over this game and deciding whether or not to back it on Kickstarter and decided I would let me wife, the more casual gamer, decide whether we would back it. She likes to play games like this on her ipad, and I figured, since it is her area I would let her do the honors. She watched the teaser video and her face started to glow so brightly I needed to don my shades. She practically ripped the mouse out of my hand so we could back it!

The Secret Cove starts as all respectable adventures from the UK start: a night of drunken reverie in a pub. On this particular night you listen to some fishermen tell the tale of a lost smugglers’ treasure, so you decide to go all Indiana fucking Jones and look for it. You wake up on a beach (I’d wager your butt hurts from a forgotten debacle with the fishermen) and your character starts to analyze his life and wonder where he went wrong. After all, to end up an out of work deckhand he must’ve missed a good pointer somewhere. At least your house is nice.

The boarded up window is a conversation piece…

Well, fuck it’s a lot better than the house I don’t have. Either way, your character sets out to uncover the lost smugglers’ treasure. Throughout this sleepy little fishing village you’ll find connections to witchcraft, smugglers, intrigue and mystery. The world in this will be non-linear. Have you ever played an adventure game? Often they more or less leave breadcrumbs along a specific path that leads your through the plotline of the game. You don’t really take part in a developing story as much as you are a sightseer on a virtual tour group of yourself. The Secret Cove will be a large and open world composed of about 100 scenes you can interact with. As you progress, more and more of the world becomes accessible.

Fuck! I knew these ancient binoculars were a scam!

An interesting feature is that the puzzles will remain as relevant to the real world as possible. I remember playing a game where I had to tie a rope to a sword to create a sort of grappling hook style device so I could climb up out of a subway. It wasn’t exactly intuitive. Granted, that was a comedic adventure, other adventures I have played impeded progress just by making puzzles backward and non-intuitive. When that happens it makes the player feel cheated and a little stupid. These devs have decided to go with puzzles that are difficult and still make fucking sense to the character. Like welding metal together or fashioning a crowbar in a town with no Home Depot (hardware store). The game makes sense and it is all relevant to the work of a British deckhand. Well… former deckhand turned rogue archaeologist. Another thing to consider is that some of the puzzles will be inventory-centric item combining puzzles similar to those found in Zork. These are fun and you end up with a lot of items one you, but it is fun knowing that you had the answer in your backpack the whole time!

Perfect! My robot penis is complete!

This dev duo known as Cheeky Sprite Studios is working hard to make this game, and they’ve even enlisted Richard Douglas, professional composer, to work with them. That soundtrack is available as a backing incentive, too. Their long list of incentives includes things like getting into their credits, having your name etched on a cave wall, the game (duh), artbook, soundtrack and much more. Want a little taste of what the game will feel like? Check out The Secret Cove’s website! Part of these types of games is getting associated with another lovely locale, and this is no different. The secret cove will feature locations and scenes from well-known Cornish towns and landmarks like St. Ives Wharf, Padstow Harbour, Minack Theatre, St. Michael’s Mount, Eden Project, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tintagel Castle and many more.

They have some pretty neat stretch goals involved, including getting this game on Steam Greenlight and having artifacts that will give you something on their website, so come join us on an adventure! It’ll be a lot of fun, and I promise you can bring a bag of wheat thins to snack on.

When I was a kid, my friend would come over with a copy of Road Rash for Sega Genesis. We’d race for hours while beating each other over the head with any number of clubbed and bladed implements. Ah, the joys of youth! It has been many years since and I hadn’t even heard the name of this spoken, and I had begun to wonder if it was ever real at all. I played Twisted Metal on the Playstation and any number of other games that tried to emulate it, but none that tried to recreate the balls-to-the-wall motorcycle racing gauntlet that was Road Rash. Then yesterday, it happened. I heard of a projecton Kickstarter that was to emulate this game, and it had already reached its funding goal. Its name was Road Redemption.

In this title, you will be playing a Katana-clad member of a mid-western America motorcycle gang. You have to move your way up in the ranks and take control of drug trading routes. It’s a visceral title that will actually hit harder than its spiritual predecessor. Thing is, it won’t be made by the same people that made Road Rash. In fact, a lot of these developers grew up playing games on the same systems I did, so they remember the good old days of games that make you earn their respect rather than the spoon-fed titles of today.

Who says real badasses never look back at an explosion?

This looks like a title that will take esports to an awesome new level and bring people away from their Xboxes and Call of Duty. You’ll earn money by racing, sure, but if I can wield a shotgun on a motorcycle, why would I just want to race all the time? Luckily there will also be assassinations, robberies and other challenges. Getting the goods will allow you to level your character, buy better hardware and upgrade your bike so you can really take on the tough guys.

The storyline is a sort of made-in-America Mad Max routine. You are part of stated motorcycle gang in post-apocalyptic mid-west America, and the country is run by a ruthless dictator. You gang-leader decides that it would be a great idea to ride into the capital with the intent of killing the dictator. I guess it doesn’t go too well, since the game description implies heavily that shit hits the fan for you and everyone you know. You then have to track this guy down and, pending his judgment at the gang’s hands, decide what to do about the whole dictator situation.

Flying blurry men never did know how to ride bikes well…

One of the more vague features of this game comes with the life-system. There will be no extra lives, but the experience, gear and upgrades you earn should stick with you. What does this mean? Fuck if I know, but I guess you have a lot of family members who are willing to step up and take over your cause. You’re probably from one of those massive Irish-Catholic families you see all over television. What’s more is that multi-player mode will be all about you building your gang and then taking to the internet where you will join up with or against your friends. Hey, competition is just as much fun as working together, sometimes. Personally, I cannot wait to throw someone under a bus.. fucking literally!

The best part about all of this? Road Redemption comes out tomorrow on Steam as Early Access. So get those bike helmets ready. We’re info for one hell of a ride. Get ready for the best rash you’ve ever seen!

It is starting to happen. Games are coming out on mobile platforms that aspire to be more than just quick little solo challenges. Mobile gaming is starting to earn its stripes as a “real gaming” platform. Don’t believe me? Check this game out. It’s based on the ancient Korean martial art, and it utilizes the fighter concept to pit players against one another. It is still deep in development, if you go to the game’s website, you can sign up to receive updates about its release!

So right now you get to choose between four character, two male and two female. There are also two different arenas to battle in, but the “space” in the arenas are pretty small. Really the goal is to get up on your enemy and deliver blows to their helmet or to their waistband. This scores you a hit and lowers their health. There is also a stamina bar that lowers depending on how many moves you do, and attacking and blocking will lower it briefly before it refills.

I can see you stepped in a poop…

Controls are simple, back and forth arrows allow you to scootch in close to your enemy. Above those there is the block button, which makes your character drop their shoulder. There are two attack buttons, a low and high attack. Low attacks are aimed at the waistband while the high attack is aimed at the head. Experimenting with the attacks in combination with the move buttons causes your character to perform a variety of different style attacks. It is a lot of fun. It is pretty fast-paced and a lot of fun, even though there were only two different arenas that I could choose from: Dojang and Iran.

The background and art of the game is rather stunning for a mobile game. Taekwondo Global Tournament really took me by surprise! Right now there is no sound, but with the attention being paid to the rest of the game, I don’t doubt that it will be spectacular when it’s released! You can watch the teaser on you tube!

Bucketman is a bizarre game that takes the location information about your neighborhood and turns it into a game. Just the introductory levels, which all take place in Palo Alto, California, are frustrating and difficult, but the game has its charms.

The story is that there are Artificially Intelligent Vehicles, or AIVs , roaming the streets and you have to take on the form of a sentient bucket to stop them. Probably related to the Kool Aide Man. In this battle for chromatic dominance, you control your bucketman with a concentric joystick pad. You can also jump over the AIVs and there is another button, but I was having some trouble getting to the use of that thing. It is a fun game, though a bit trying on the patience.

The game gets more and more complex as you play, and the goal is to battle it out with the AIVs. You collect different color paints to raise your stats, such as walking speed and air-time for your jumps. An easier way to put is you can get more ups so jumps last longer. There is also water that you have to collect throughout a level, which comprises the main goal and gets you more time. So run around collecting more paints and waters. You can also buy more paints and such with in-app purchases, but they are pretty well hidden in the menu, almost as if the developer is ashamed to ask. But no worries, it isn’t in your face or forced, so it makes me feel really good about these guys. You can get this app free on Google Play!

Bucketman is a great location-based game that deserves some credit, even if the concept is bizarre and the story is goofy. I mean who would believe that Google cars could take over the world..? wait a minute…

I am not the right kind of smart to play chess. A lot of people suck at it, and just being smart doesn’t help. It takes a certain patience and a skill for long-term planning, both require focus, discipline and training. It also requires a strong resistance to falling asleep while sitting down, ability to avoid daydreaming and a skill for not flipping the board when you lose after 4 hours of grueling play. O yea, and if you play it in the park, you have to do all this on a fucking timer. Fuck that! I am just not studied enough in the art of chess to really know how to play! I know the basics though. Plenty of sorry fuckers know the basics! We were fucking taught them by some masochistic prick (or prickess) that taught us to play only so they could experiment with strategies before mercilessly murdering us. It’s not funny. It’s not fucking fair. And it is about fucking time we got even.

Thanks to this fucking guy, we’ll be able to do just that. Study that face. He’s is the guy normal people like me will be hi-fiving while our chess-skilled friends will hire a band of rabid ninja monkeys to hunt him down. Really, I am pretty sure that the kickstarter for the game will be used to fend off rabid bands of ninja monkeys. All he did was add cards to chess. Yup. That is fucking it! So what do they do? Oh, my that is the fun part. In short, they will make it so that you will be on fair ground against your chess-club friends. It makes chess shorter, more fun and hilarious. Our game took only an hour and a half, accounting for the stops to marvel at the wonderful art on the cards. The creator was able to send me some demo PDF’s that I printed for play!

Had my pawns running offense for my knight until he was taken with this card, getting an enemy knight one extra space for the kill!

My brother Joel has an awesome twili… I MEAN.. vampires vs werewoles chess set. Black is werewolves, white is vampires. It went with the medieval theme of the game, and even played on some of its more magical or demonic cards. You play chess as normal, except at the start each player gets 5 cards. You can play one card per turn and there are two different card types: T cards that take up a whole turn and C cards that play concurrently with a piece move. Now, I started off the shenanigans with a “Rally the Troops” card that allowed me to move three pawns at once! It was one hell of an opening move that made my brother laugh and get his game on!

As we played we realized that this made chess casual and even entertaining. We scarcely took the game more seriously than we would have if we were playing parcheesi. And as each card went down, it made one of us laugh and groan simultaneously. After a few turns, I started really getting devious with Joel. I charged my rook through a pawn with “Phantasmic Step” and took my brother’s rook, leaving him a little confused. This happened a lot though, one or the other of us would make a crafty play or take a good piece and we’d look at the card: half to verify that was actually in the deck, half to see the artwork and read the card itself. The cards can often be funny and they make a serious effort to look really really nice, which worked. Look through the cards on the Beguile site. Rather lovely.

Our majestic wall of Old Spice

Then there is this fucking card. Did you read that card? Yea, I was mopping the floor with him. I got all of his pawns, a rook, a knight and even his queen while simultaneously making a few devious plays of my own. I used “Necromancy” after sacrificing my queen for a good capture, then I used a bishop to take a few pieces and played “Sacrificial Lamb” to sacrifice a pawn and keep my bishop. I was closing in for the kill… then he played that shit up there! I heaved a massive sigh and traded spots with him. Now faced with grim prospects, I began picking my attacks more carefully.

Joel started getting really devious, throwing out a few plays that got a couple of my pieces. At one point he played “Holy Warrior” and moved his knight like a bishop to take my knight. Except I had “Man in the Mirror” and took his knight instead! There were a number of really clever plays he got off, but by the luck of the cards I was able to get his army down to nothing but a king. I got his king into checkmate and! …. He played “Back Against the Wall” teleporting the king across the board. He was also able to use catacombs to get across the board and take a couple of my last remaining pieces with just his fucking king! That was ok, though. After a while I was letting him take all my pieces. just waiting. Waiting until stalemate. Once it happened I stood victorious! I threw down “Sir Charles Roundhouse”, which allows you to win in a stalemate! I got that card on the second turn and was able to really give it to him!

Sir Charles Roundhouse now has a barony in the wolf-lands of Nothern Siberia.

The moral of this story is that you don’t need to know how to play chess to have fun with chess anymore. Beguile adds some great flavor and a faster pace to a game that is traditionally pretty tough and makes it casual and entertaining in ways that it was never meant to be. The great news is that the Kickstarter is already past 50%! Woochah! Let’s get some money in there so we can start working on those stretch goals! (note to Americans: It’s a Canadian Kickstarter, so exchange rates account for the shipping cost!) This would be a fantastic addition to any nerd’s game cabinet! I wonder if something like this could be done for checkers?

The dutch have a pretty good thing going in the gaming industry, and a lot of what they’ve been putting out has given me a reason to nod with confident approval. Excamedia is another dutch developer, and their game – A Clumsy Adventure – does anything but fall flat on its face. Still in Pre-Alpha, its platforming charm and unique design leave me wondering what lies beyond the curtain at the end of the preview build on Indie Database.

In A Clumsy Adventure, you play as Zack, a clumsy soldier taking part in VR training. He manages to destroy a supercomputer and gets discharged. Not a huge fucking surprise, considering supercomputers usually run into the millions. So this guy is off to a shitty start. Zack is kidnapped by a secret group of aliens and he is used to brainwash the entire human population. From the description on the company site, it seems he is possibly the dumbest person on Earth. Nice fucking job, Zack! At least you don’t spell your name with an ‘h’. Our whole world defenseless, Zack can’t remember what happened, likely repressing the memories of how he rendered the collective grey matter of the human race as cognitively effective as rice pudding. And the best part? This fucking guy has to save the world! The ENTIRE world! IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!!!! This is the most terrifying apocalypse story I have ever heard. He ends up in a dark place, with only one friend: a light that follows and guides him. To succeed, this fucking guy has to beat the generals of the alien army and steal their dimensional keys, then stop the evil alien emperor AND his alien fleet from destroying everything anyway!

That look on his face is scarcely the confidence-inspiring countenance of heroism

Zack has a lot to put back together, but on the bright side it can’t get much worse. Despite his inhabiting the least-envied place among heroes, the game itself looks and feels pretty nice. In the pre-alpha, you drop out of the sky and land in a jungle fraught with chaos. In the background, massive beasts stalk through the dank undergrowth, redeyes dart between trees and the howls of unknown origin resonate for miles. It is a scenery well set. It isn’t long before the tutorial is delivered via internal monologue. I always find it weird when we are led to believe that a character jumps by thinking about a green A-button, but it always makes me giggle.

After pushing around a boulder, jumping up some ledges and running around, you start to get a feel for the controls. Everything is fairly simple and, mostly, smooth. Granted, you have those odd little hiccups, but the game reeled me in and didn’t stop until the curtain (quite literally) fell. One of the most noticeable elements of this game is its use of the lighting in Unity. Now, I am not a fucking developer, I’m just not that dedicated. I took the easy way out and became a writer. But this game honestly uses Unity like the swatch-board of lighting and color that it deserves to be noticed for. I saw screenies made with Unity that I thought were taken from an unannounced Elder Scrolls title (lord knows the series will need to be resurrected after ESO). Richard Garriott favorited that tweet. Made my knees weak. But Unity honestly has so much more to offer than just an overwhelming deluge of apps and mobile games. Unity is an engine with so much untapped potential, and A Clumsy Adventure is reaching deep into that pool and procuring something magnificent.

Aside from being a clumsy jerk, Zack is also a genocidal maniac when it comes to red-eyed alien things.

The game goes from nearly 2D, accomplished by silhouetting everything, then it switches to a world of vibrant colors and magnificent flora. Ironically, this switch comes from outside, where it is dark, to inside caves, where the character becomes the focus and light and colors abound. Granted, the artistic silhouetting has the effect of bringing out the colors of enemies and pickups. Pickups come in two forms, only one of which I’ve been able to get: the backpacks and the batteries. The backpacks are lives, I think. I am not certain be cause I always freak out when I get surprised by the occasional enemy. Given their size, I imagine that they come with a full trauma center complete with defibrillators and flirty, blonde nurses. There are also the batteries, which luminesce an ethereal green. While it is possible these have a yet unstated link to the aliens, I like to imagine they will power the radioactive Nerf guns Zack must inevitably employ to vanquish the evil alien emperor. A lot of the simple jumping puzzles that the devs employed in this pre-alpha preview also utilized strong deviousness. I am excited to see where else they will go with this title in the future.

Lovely pink everything! My wife would never leave this cave.

This game has a feel that reminds me of Earthbound for reasons I cannot explain. Though I doubt this game will have the same vaguely off-color pop-culture references, there is still much we can expect A Clumsy Adventure to provide. All of it good, but mostly me getting pissed off at this. I guess I should look on the bright side, Zack spends his whole adventure making up for the fact that he blundered his way into subjugating the human race, and there isn’t an evil dictator that could accomplish this with all his efforts. Toss a few coins at it once the kickstarter takes off and watch this one. I have a feeling it should blow your minds.